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14 Feb 2013

London to Helsinki & onwards!

Our first blog from abroad! This will just be a short one. We ended up staying up all night on our final
night in the UK before our flight to Helsinki.
You may remember that we decided to head to Helsinki to take the train
to Moscow so that we would enter & exit Russia by train.

Don't forget we hadn't slept for 24 hours at this point!

We left at 5am and took the flight,
which as you can imagine was pretty uneventful – we both slept the whole way!

On arrival to Helsinki we made our
way to the central station by bus and waited in a local restaurant. Well, we thought it was local & it ended
up being a Czech restaurant…so we had a traditional Czech lunch instead!

Helsinki Train Station

Our train to Moscow was slightly
delayed but when it arrived we were very excited – the start of our long
journey across Russia. We had decided to
start our journey in a leisurely way which meant we had booked 1st
class for this overnight train – this meant we had a cabin just for the two of
us.

Our train from Helsinki to Moscow.
John has the supplies for the journey!

The train tickets!

Our 1st class cabin

The experiences started nearly immediately – we received some tea & biscuits from our train attendant and the journey started.

And so, also,
started the ritual of passport checking, customs checking and various people
hoping for a sale of random goods! As
the clock moves forward in Moscow we wanted to head to bed quite quickly – so we
tucked ourselves in on each our sides and started to sleep – we were, of
course, quite tired so it wasn’t hard to fall asleep.

But suddenly there was a violent tug at the
door and the lights were turned on and it became clear that we were about to
cross the Russian border – we were so tired it felt like torture! We were scrutinised by the passport control
and then another lady came to the door and shouted “LIFT!” and we had to get
out of bed and lift our mattresses to show we weren’t smuggling any aliens into
the country. We passed and were left
alone for the night.